Google have made another huge leap towards trusted brands, now showing multiple listings from a single domain. From the example given in the blog post, the domain amnh.org has 7 listings on the first page for “exhibitions at amnh”. If you count the customary Wikipedia listing, that leaves two spaces left for other sites. Another example can be seen if you search for “apple ipods”

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=apple+ipods&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

There is already a lot of discussion going on in Webmaster World around this, so be sure to check that out. But it’s another interesting move from Google:

PPC

Google is a commercial entity, their decisions are governed by money. This along with other PPC advancements (mentioned in How Google is Moving the Organic Cheese), is motivated by getting advertisers to spend more on paid. Organic listings are free, Paid listings are not. The share of traffic coming from paid search decreased in 2009 with organic share increasing. No doubt the recession was a big factor, but also, SEO can provide a better ROI. PPC can be a like a crack habit, you have to pay to get your fix, costs are going up and due to consumer behavior (researching more), conversions are down. SEO can provide a better ROI (long term).

Just to note here, I work in both PPC and SEO, I don’t advocate one above the other, I look at search as a whole.

Small Businesses / Affiliate Websites

How will this affect both affiliate websites and small businesses. They may not appear on a first page, which is now taken up by brand listings and Google properties. Paid search may be their only option.

The evolution of running an Affiliate website has been getting interesting over the past year. Google recently announced trademarks can now be used in Adcopy for Canada, UK and Ireland (this was already available in the US), giving Affiliates more amo. Google also began testing related ads meaning an Affiliate doesn’t need to bid on your trademark to be shown.

Of course Google has given brands sitelinks, which help them get more real estate for branded search, but it’s curios to see how PPC evolves.

Turning off branded search is always an interesting thing to test. Google’s constant tweaking with their Ads make it more difficult (if in an Affiliate heavy market) to switch of branded search.

Reputation Management

There is a large part of reputation management that is centered around pushing bad PR down the Google pages. This may not be required anymore. If a brand owns the first page of Google (along with a Wiki listing), you may not need to worry about a negative listing.

It’s important not to panic, the sky isn’t falling in just yet, but search is an INTERESTING place to be right now !!!

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. How Google is Moving The Organic Cheese
2. Is Branding the Answer for Google, Maybe Not
3. Appeal to the brains internal filters :: Search Stratgies

I was going to do a big post on the initial steps I go through to construct a link development strategy for a site but LinkResearchTools is misbehaving at the moment due to their new release (which is awesome), so instead I am going to do a much shorter post on an interesting listing and how establishing your competition can be difficult at times.

Link Analysis is so Much More !!

Competitive research is the first thing I do when looking at a new market/client site/getting new link development ideas/relaxing … you get the idea, I am a link geek. Most people don’t see the true value in conducting link research. It’s not just about getting a couple of link ideas, it can break down a whole companies marketing strategy. Links are the glue that bind your site to the rest of the web. They can say a lot about your site, the market, what sells and who your real competitors are. This is the best/worst thing about online, it’s very hard to keep any hard working marketing ploy to yourself.

The Point

Ok, back to the point. I was looking at a market in the UK today and pulled back results on 4 keywords “manchester hotels”, “hotels in manchester”, “manchester city centre hotels”, “hotels in manchester city centre”.

As any good SEO/Conversion expert will know, it’s not just about ranking a web page, it’s about ranking the right web page for certain queries, so I am not sure Premier Inn would be happy with Google’s results:

“Manchester hotels” / “hotels in Manchester”

This is the right page to bring up and will obviously help with organic conversion. Using prices in meta description can give your organic CTR a lift (dependent on where you are on the page and what competitors have listed), but I bet there is a big drop of at their rates page. I did 5 searches and never got a price below £60.

“Manchester city centre hotels” / “hotels in Manchester city centre”

Now I am not saying it’s surprising an inner page ranks for the head keywords and another page ranks for the long tail versions of these (LateRooms are great at this). But it’s an interesting listing. The keywords aren’t mentioned on the home page (other than an internal link), there are no anchor text links pointing to those page and in terms of internal links, they are not excessively linking back to the page with that anchor text.

It did remind me of this post “Are we Over-Engineering the Link Graph“. Working across a lot of different markets and doing a lot of link analysis has taught me there are often rankings that are difficult to explain. Big brands rank better in Google, the Vince update helped sustain that, although the latest May Day update seemed to focus on  lowering domain rank for long tail keywords. Obviously in the above example, Premier Inn would prefer their Manchester page to rank for long tail versions of that keyword too (maybe not, maybe they don’t care). It could be a simply case of tweaking some internal links or a press release with target keywords. But when doing analysis and faced with unexplained rankings, just ensure you gather enough data to formulate a strategy for target keywords. Looking at multiple competitors and segmenting analysis by:

On-Site / Internal Links / Back Links

is a good place to start (obviously the most important thing is to ask can you match their product).

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. A Month With LinkResearchTools from Cemper.com
2. Greenlights Report on Most Visible Accomadation Websites
3. Google Sends the Long Tail Screaming for May-Day

Since I dabble a little in Affiliate marketing (although I recently changed strategy after reading a lot from ViperChill.com and now am concentrating on 1 site at a time), it’s great to see an Affiliate event in Dublin.

The A4uexpo is in Dublin next Wednesday, full details are as follows:

Date: Wed 25th Aug 2010
Roadshow Starts: 17:30
Dress:Casual
Venue:Cafe en Seine

Note: Register on the Roadshow page so the event organisers can ensure they have sufficient space. TD, CJ, LinkShare, Affiliate Window a lot others are going to be attending the event, so a great chance to meet and chat with the networks.

Definitely worth getting out and supporting events like this, so I may speak with you there.

No related posts.

Recently I was doing a little research when I noticed the area reserved for PPC ads top of page looked as if it was blending more and more into the organic section:

Glad to see I wasn’t the only one who noticed it. Over on PPC blog they did a good post covering this change. For most people working in online, the PPC ads stand out a mile, but for the untrained eye, small visual changes do make a big difference. Google is continuing to add PPC initiatives that directly affect the space given to organic listings

1. Ad Sitelinks

The image above gives some good examples of PPC sitelinks in use. They allow businesses to add more advertisement per PPC ad and take up more real estate top of page. Originally available for brand keywords, they are now available for generic keywords (as per above).

This makes bidding on your brand keywords more appealing as you can deep link to offers, promotions. At SMX Advanced London this year (great post from Wordstream on the main take aways), there were stats presented around turning PPC brand off and the affects it had on traffic. The result was traffic remained the same, but revenue decreased by 6%. Maybe as a result of better targeting from PPC ads in terms of destination URLs. There are also other reasons to bid on your brand, here is a good article from Econsultancy on the subject.

Here is a great post on RedFly covering everything you need to know about sitelinks. There is also a great post here that measures the performance of sitelinks.

Of course now Google is allowing the use of  trademarks in Ad text (already done in the US), bidding on your brand may be even more important.

2. Local Extensions

Google Location extensions in PPC ads have been around for a while, although I don’t see them being widely used. Could just be I haven’t noticed them much. These allow businesses to create Google Ads linked to their Local business center listing. The PPC ad will then have an expandable map. What’s more interesting is how Google have integrated sponsored listings into the map area:

Again the lines between paid and organic blur a little. More on the paid enhanced listing here.

3. Google Product Extensions

Google product extensions available in the US allows you to leverage your Google Merchant Center to add product listings to PPC ads. Again this is done in the form of an expandable section under your PPC ad. I don’t have a good image of this. Google isn’t showing me any examples when looking on competitive keywords.

What About The Cheese ?

I was reading extracts from the book “Who Moved my Cheese“and it got me thinking of SEO consultants that have tunnel vision. Not keeping up on how the SERP’s are being fragmented with local search, images, video, PPC extensions could lead to massive issues for your future success.

For example, check out the link I used to search for “Who Moved My Cheese”

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=who+moved+my+cheese&fp=ea2cd8eab02d18af

Just from this you would look at:

- Look into Google Base and “Shopping Results” if in the Ecommerce space

- Look at Youtube. It’s a goldmine for Ecommerce sites. I split tested (with help from my younger brother, who is a big a social wizz kid), 4 blog posts and 4 videos on a product. The result was near 1000 views of the posts and 25,000 video views, plus they are still climbing.

It’s definitely worth keeping an eye on your SERPs and Traffic over rankings. The landscape is changing fast.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Trusted Brands get Multiple Listings in Google – Did Affiliates Get Another Kicking
2. Use Google to Research and Dominate Google in 2009
3. Is Branding the Answer for Google, Maybe Not

When I first began working in SEO, I decided to read everything. On top of the normal working hours for an SEO, I added 20 to 25 extra hours to read and apply what i read. Within 3 months of working in SEO, I had my own affiliate site up and collecting a lot of traffic. After 6 months of constantly reading SEO, I started to feel there was a lot of noise out there. After my first year, I realised there are lots of people writing great content on SEO, but who didn’t seem to back any of it up with real world examples. Ever since then most of the extra hours I put in are balanced towards testing, rather than listening to what people think may be happening.

Social & SEO the Evolution

I have been reading a lot of great posts over the past month on the effects of social on SEO and how that impact will grow over the next couple of years. One of the best posts on this (if not the best) was David Harrys titled “The Evolution of Rankings Signals: Google is Getting Past the link”. This post is jam packed with information on how the fundamentals of search could change with Google focusing more and more on: Temporal Data / Behavioral Data and Social Data.  I discussed this post with David over on SEODojo and his explanation of Google using the social graph to tweak results was really thought provoking. One of his best comments was, if results are personalised, you can’t spam them (why would you spam your own results).

There are also some other good posts on this from Eric Enge on the death of link building and another over at searchenginewatch called “Are we over Engineer the Link Graph“. Finally there is a post from SimplyZesty called “How Has Social Media Affected Search“.

The Issue

To stay ahead in search/social or online in general, you need to stay ahead of the curve. You need to understand what’s coming down the road and prepare for it, as best you can. But you also need to stay clear of changing your strategy to try and keep up with the latest chatter online. Most of the information contained in the posts above I agree with, but some I don’t. In the post over on searchengine watch, one of the most important parts of that study was in the comments, where Eric Ward replied:

“You write “each keyword space/market space (and georegion) is going to have its own definition of a ‘natural’ link graph.” While I am happy to see folks coming around to this conclusion, for 16 years I’ve been yelling that every web site requires a different link seeking and publicity strategy. What is effective for one site may not work for another. Every site has a manifest linking destiny.”

BINGO

This is important. In SimplyZestys post they write:

a. “What is clear is that this weighting towards social media references is sorting out the good from the bad”

Is this clear ? Have they tested it ? They seem to have made the leap from Eric Enge discussing why social media could start adding weight to a sites ranking, to it already happening in a clear and measurable way. No doubt Google’s QDF algorithm may use twitter and other social metrics to help it bypass the natural order of things for trending topics. But it definitely is not clear how Google will integrate social metrics into the main algorithm. For the best explanation refer to David’s post above on the social graph.

Secondly:

b.“You can no longer just create a load of content and spam links to it.”

Again, this point isn’t valid. Its market dependent. It’s like saying Wayne Rooney can no longer score goals, because he was awful during the world cup. There are a multitude of markets where you can indeed create loads of content and spam links to it. Most people who work in SEO will concur with that.

My Two Cents

The last post I wrote about link development touched on this subject. In terms of what I have EXPERIENCED. The effects of personalised search has been huge. I have seen keyword increases for head keywords in competitive markets, yet traffic dwindling. In some cases this is due to a change in user search behavior, with both branded search and large aggregator sites taking a lot of the market share (will be the next blog post). In other cases it looks as if it’s down to personlised search or Google’s rotation of rankings. I am firmly on side with David Harrys posting, in terms of behavior metrics set to play (if not already) a huge part in the future of rankings.

In terms of social, I am totally onside with Eric Enge, social will play a big role. But what I can’t say is how that role will be integrated by Google into the main algorithm. Dependent on the market, I do look at integrating some type of social content into the mix, but Michael Gray has shown, Google doesn’t always follow their own advice.

In terms of some other markets I am in (personal affiliate sites), Fashion, Online Business, Selling Software – it’s business as usual – crappy links and ok content

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Is Social Media Killing your SEO Strategy
2. SEO & Social Media: Spreading SEO Graffiti Across the Web
3. How to ensure your SEO Strategy Fails like a Champion

For those who have read some of my previous posts, you would know I am a big fan of LinkResearchTools from the guys over at CEMPER. Since I started using them some months back, they have continued to add a huge amount of features to the tools. What’s better is, the price has remained the same. Recently they have added two great features:

1) Link Profiling – read about the new feature here. Even if you don’t sign up, that post is worth reading from a link development purpose. I would recommend signing up to their 7 day course.

2. Recover Link Juice – read about the new feature here. Great tool. I have done something like this using Google Webmaster Tools, but the juice recovery tool makes the whole process a lot easier and provides a lot more insights.

So there you have it, to top it all of the guys are offering a promo offer of 30% off if you sign up before Tuesday night (hmm not sure if that is tonight).

Please note, no links above are affiliate links. I honestly just love these tools and know they are a great help for link development.

EDIT

For the 30% promo check out the post http://www.linkresearchtools.com/news/link-juice-recovery/, which has details.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. A Month With LinkResearchTools from Cemper.com
2. Eric Enge Interviews Matt Cutts and CEMPER with a Link Survey
3. Buying High PR Sites to Get Some Link Juice

It’s official, the fall out from the may day update has produced some of the funniest threads I have read across the webmaster forums.

The Fall Out

It would seem people have decided Google is just broken. Over on the WebmasterWorld, most people are convinced “The serp’s are very broken right now. Or are they?” (no they aren’t).

There are some incredibly naive posts. People comparing YOY traffic and highlighting a huge increase in Bing as proof people are no longer using Google. This is some “I believe in UFO” kind of theories. Google’s share of search has decreased slightly in the US, but they have so much share and Bing have been advertising like crazy, that it’s not surprising for them to go down a little.

What About the Spam

Back to the point of the post, “What About the Spam”. Something that has been of interest over the past couple of months is webmasters posting examples of spam sites dominating certain niches, whilst their sites got hammered after the May Day update. A lot of the examples were in kind of spammy niches (MP3 downloads), but nevertheless, their is some truth in these posts.

Why Spam Sites Can Rawk

If you think about a good spam site. They are usually

- targeted at a couple of keywords.

- have a keyword rich domain

- have lots and lots of content (auto content) dragged in all on topic

- have a lot of links pointed at them in a short space of time (yes spammy links, but “hey that doesn’t work anymore”, well, lets come to that later).

If the point of the May day update was to try and decrease off target pages that rank for keywords (or synonyms of those keywords) due to domain authority, whilst giving more preference to niche sites that are a lot more focused around that keyword, well, this could suit those spammy sites.

But What About Those Spammy Links

Let’s get to the crux of the matter. Despite all us link developers advocating a link development strategy that is centered around relationship marketing, great content and social media, spammy links DO WORK. I was at SMX Advanced and went to the link building sessions. There were some great ideas in those sessions and I am totally on side with link building making a mess of the net. But I cringe when I hear the gurus stating “That kind of linking doesn’t work anymore”. It does, I know, I have run spammy sites in niches and ranked top 3 for competitive keywords using nothing more than a old hat crappy link tactic.

So You Create Spam

To understand how best to utilize link development strategies, you should play around with all tactics. I was interested in how far I could push exact anchor text linking through profile links so I created two sites in different niches. Both were keyword lead domains, both had lots of content, both were selling affiliate products, after 3 months, between them, they were taking in 10,ooo visitors per month, both got de-indexed. I didn’t care, the process of getting one of them back indexed and re-ranking where it used to, was a great learning process.

The Problem With Link Development

The truth of link building is quick win linking tactics still work and in some markets are all that count. Using great products like linkresearchtools from CEMPER will just tell you all links in your market have been acquired in some underhand way. If a business is counting on Google traffic to keep them afloat, how do you not get drawn into that mindset. It’s great for Google to offer quality advice on link building and I agree with it all. But when they say:

“Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them.”

the point being missed is long lasting techniques may be to far on the horizon for some companies who have to dig deep for PPC costs until all that link baiting and great content begins to kick in (link exchanging is a waste of time by the way). They may be in a market where competitors are happy to burn through sites, hey if own get’s bumped out, they have several more coming up behind it.

Your Experience on Link Development

When I am putting together link development strategies for big online brands, it’s easy to build it around great content, integrating their strategy in with the PR, offline and marketing team. There is a lot more scope to put together a hollistic strategy.

When I get asked to do link building for smaller clients through Searchbrat, I find a lot of their preconceptions of what should be offered comes from the one size fits all packages being widely offered throughout the web. Most of these are automated solutions, firing out spun articles all over the place. Don’t get me wrong, packages are a great way to categorize your offering. But how do you compete with services that offer 1000 links for $97 per month. There seems to be a race to the bottom when it comes to this kind of link building.

In my affiliate life (which I love and is my play time), I mess about with the automated link tools on throw away sites, but I can say, the results are often poor and don’t last long. If I am working on a site I care about, automated links never enter the picture.

The Final Word

For me link building tools like Influence Finder show how the process of link development is and will continue to change. There is a lot more of relationship marketing involved. The skill set is also changing. The strategy needs to be integrated with other areas of your business. Of course, for small to medium size businesses, the problem of resources exist. It’s more difficult to put together something that requires a lot of resources. In cases like this, link packages can work, but if you are getting 1000 links for a 100 bucks, believe me, those links aren’t going to build you a solid revenue stream. Keep in mind, the best kind of link is one your competitor can’t get.

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. The 12 Days of Link Building
2. How to ensure your SEO Strategy Fails like a Champion
3. 80-20 rule for your SEO keyword strategy

I wanted to follow up on my post (Google “Understanding the Consumer Buying Cycle“) around Google’s new Adwords Search Funnels by sharing another quick tip on Google Analytics advanced segments.

If you a running an Ecommerce site with a high ticket item, chances are, users may need repeat visits to your site before purchasing. What’s interesting is how user behavior differs between visits. Something I look at is breaking up a site into different visit segments (if its an Ecommerce site).

Visits To Purchase

The first thing you want to establish is “Your Visits to Purchase”:

The visits to purchase will show you how many times a user needs to interact with your site before purchasing.

First Time Visitors

Not everyone comes to your site to purchase something. The truth is a lot of people come to your site with no intention of converting. When you look at a conversion rate of 2% (the European average for Ecommerce sites), keep this in mind. You are not losing 98% of your possible conversions, many of these were never possibles to begin with. Something that can provide some interesting data for search is to create an Advanced Segment as follows:

Visitor Type – Matches Exactly – New Visitor

Keyword – Does Not Contain – <Branded Keyword>

Page – Matches Exactly – Goal URL

In the above I segment non branded search traffic where a user has reached a URL that indicates they are a prospect. For example, the Goal URL maybe one created when a user searches for rates.

The above advanced segment is pretty interesting for looking at keywords that drive new users into the top of a funnel. Looking at top content using this segment can also prove insightful. The top content first time users view tends to be a lot different from those who have been to your site before.

Repeat Visitors

You should always segment New vs Returning visitors. Something I tend to do is create segments for Visitors who have been to the site a number of times:

The above creates an advanced segment for users who have visited your site 3 times. This is a little to exact, I usually create one for a user who has visited 3+ times. Why ? Well, again looking at top content may show these users are getting stuck at a certain point, even when they have been to your site a number of times. If a large portion of this traffic is converting, then maybe consider creating an advanced segment for users who have visited your site 3+ times and didn’t convert. Is there another reason they come back to your site ? Maybe there is some content on your site they keep refering to ? This can lead to setting up more goals for this particular set of users i.e. splitting your site into Micro Conversions ( Check out Web Analytics 2.0 for more on that, no link, simply Google it, Avinash will thank for me helping with his personalised search )

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. Filtered Traffic provides great information :: Google Analytics :: Google Analytics Filters
2. Advances Segments in Google Analytics to Track Multiple Currencies
3. Google Analytics the FAB FIVE

This post is obviously a little late, by now you are probably screaming, pulling your hair out and asking, where the hell is all my traffic gone. Or you are one of the happy guys, hey, my traffic just got a s**t load of more traffic. Go pour yourself a beer, celebrate, live it up, it may not last if this change is still being rolled out !!

Much to everyones frustration, Google zapped people’s organic traffic around the 28th April / May 1st, something I first began reading in this excellent WW Thread. Google stayed silent for quite some time on this. I looked at client sites and some of my personal sites. One of my affiliate sites lost 50% of it’s traffic in the long tail. I decided the change was related to affiliate sites (as we know Google felt the internet was a ceespool of misinformation) so began looking at no following all affiliate links and in some cases removing them from certain pages.

What Did Matt Say

Then came the lovely Matt Cutts, hair and all, to give us some information:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ok so did Matt say anything worth nothing:

- Change rolled out around April 28th
- It’s an algorithm change, here to stay
- It’s affecting the long tail of search
- The authority of your site is no longer enough to rank inner pages for long tail (interesting)
- Keep adding great content (Yes we know)
- This is not related to caffeine (hmmmm)

All the while large Ecommerce sites are losing traffic. This story has just been taken from search engine lands take on it.

The Interesting Parts

This is a ranking change, not an indexing change. This means your pages are still indexed, still ranking, but just not appearing as high as they once was.

From reading through a lot of threads on this. The first thing that strikes me is the affect on Ecommerce sites that may point to a change in how internal links are accessed or the overall authority of the site. There are countless examples of large ecommerce sites losing traffic. This was cited by Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox, as being an issue with these pages mostly being full of duplicate content, having little content on them and being several clicks from the home page.

Large sites used to dominate the long tail of search, just by the authority of their domain alone. It will be interesting to see if this changes levels the playing field a little (good for small businesses) or we start to see a lot of niche specific sites pop up top of the SERPS  i.e. home page targeted at a long tail keyword.

What Can I Do

There is so much going on in Google at the moment with the new interface changes, Caffeine still being rolled out and now May-Day giving long tail traffic a kicking. It can be a head spinning time. For May-Day I have been running splits on head vs tail for client sites. For example you can set up advanced segments as follows:

^\w+ \w+ (.+)$

Select Keyword and match this against a regular expression. It will show traffic based on 3 keywords. You can vary this to check between 3, 4, 5 etc.

What Are My Crazy Theories

I can’t help but think it has to be related to Caffeine. Google now has the power to process a lot more data about individual pages. The link economy created by Google must be something they want to change. It also seems Google is trying to eliminate web pages that rank for queries based on the authority of the domain alone. May-Day could be a combination of link devaluation and user behavior for long tail keywords i.e. internal pages that get traffic, even though it’s not to relevant.

When you work in SEO, you hear what you want to hear. It seems a lot of people are not happy with the way Google has rolled this change out. But for every unhappy webmaster, there must be a happy webmaster out there capturing some of the traffic.

For us that work in online, make sure your skill set is diverse enough to deal with this. When organic falls off a cliff, you need to put an Adwords strategy in place to take account of the traffic loss (maybe Googles plan all along !!!), do you know enough about Analytics to determine what’s happening ? Have you started looking into conversion optimisation to get the most bang for buck out of existing traffic ? What about social media to give your existing user base the tools to spread the word about your brand ?

All mediums work together, don’t be over dependent on Google !!!

Other Posts You Might Enjoy:

1. The Long Tail Rawks – SEO for WordPress
2. It’s all About the Brand for Google
3. Is Branding the Answer for Google, Maybe Not

Paying attention to your analytics is one of the most important parts of succeeding online. There is so much to be gained from spending a couple of hours per week looking through the web analytics of a given website.
Something that can be difficult is getting insights on the full consumer buying cycle. Trying to establish all the different touch points a user goes through before purchasing a product from your website can be difficult.

There are many stats packages that provide multi touch point tracking (omniture for one), although it’s also not that straight forward to setup. The most popular stats package is Google Analytics (and is what I use for most sites). The problem with Google Analytics is it works on a last click basis. This means if a user transaction path is as follows:

PPC (Generic) -> PPC (Branded) -> Organic (Branded) -> Direct -> Purchase

The purchase will go to Organic (Branded) as this is the last none direct referral medium. This is a big issue, as keywords being used in a PPC generic campaign may not be getting the recognition they deserve. These are usually measured on a ROI basis, if a keyword is showing no value, it may be pruned incorrectly.

Using Custom Reports for PPC Analysis

There are over 80 standard reports with Google Analytics. I use very few of them. One of the best things about Google Analytics is the custom report feature (and advanced segments). We can start to look at more than conversions for PPC data in order to identify keywords that are being used in the research phase of the buying cycle. For example, I have a custom report with two tabs:

Tab 1 – Data to Measure None Converting Keywords

PPC - Measure None Converting Keywords

Tab 2 – Data to Measure Converting Keywords

PPC - Converting Keywords

This allows me to flick between both sets of stats. If a keyword is showing a very poor “Per Visit Value” but is bringing in lots of users who are spending time on the site, then perhaps it’s worth keeping ?

One of the best things I got from reading  both Web Analytics books from Avinash Kuashik, is stats that need interpreting are not worth tracking. The best example is time on site. How do you know a high time on site  isn’t a sign of poor navigation ?

This needs to be factored in when reading the custom reports above.

New Search Funnels for Google Adwords

Google has gone some way to providing a solution to the problem of interpretation discussed above. They now provide  search funnels via the Adwords interface. Below is an explanation from Google:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The new funnels allow you to view a lot more stats about campaigns that may not produce conversions but are assisting other campaigns:

From playing around with the funnels, I haven’t come across any jaw dropping finds:

- Generic keywords are the first point of contact for new users, those who are researching

- Long tail keywords are used by consumers who are in buying mode i.e. done their research

- Branded keywords are usually the last point of contact in the buying cycle

But it does make pruning your list a lot easier. Something I have started to play around with is, how much of a drop in sales will you see, if branded keywords are switched off, assuming you are number one for organic and don’t have a bunch of affiliates bidding on your terms.

The new search funnels are a great addition to Google Analytics (which is getting more impressive each month) … BUT

Multi Vechile Purchases

It doesn’t resolve the issue of establishing how PPC and Organic work together. In the above transaction, organic will still receive the conversion and PPC gets left out in the cold. Two recommendations to combat this are:

- I create first click profiles for Google Analytics. This is done using a couple of hacks, which is a post all on its own

- Always, always, always split your traffic into branded and non branded

What the new Search Funnels can help you with, is establish weather PPC should be used as a branding tool for your company or not (i.e are they assisting other campaigns). Obviously, it only works if the transaction is via PPC (i.e. Organic doesn’t pinch it).

Here are a couple of other great posts on the new Search Funnels from Adwords:

PPC Blog

PPC Advice

Web.com Blog

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